Available for the first time here as an ebook, sadly, after the passing of the author, Deborah Masel, we are privy to a short sequel to her first book, Soul to Soul: Writings from Dark Places. .......

A few years before my cancer diagnosis, my partner Doug and I took two of my kids to New Zealand. We traveled with a cheap airline, whose planes seemed to need help with lift-off. As the aircraft built up speed on the runway, the four of us would wildly flap our arms, hoping to give the plane a fighting chance. We looked like ungainly birds, struggling to get our feet off the ground.

With one unpublished memoir [Soul to Soul] flapping away on various runways and now another on the way, I am inclined to think of myself as barefoot and pregnant. Cancer and pregnancy share certain characteristics. They both make you sick and tired, and they grow within you. Cancer is a kind of ghoulish mirror image of pregnancy.

Sequels in this particular literary genre are, understandably, exceptional, and I shall begin by admitting that I can’t know if this sequel is destined to become one of the exceptions, or if the cancer will take me before I say what I need to say.

Available for the first time here as an ebook, sadly, after the passing of the author, Deborah Masel, we are privy to a short sequel to her first book, Soul to Soul: Writings from Dark Places. .......

A few years before my cancer diagnosis, my partner Doug and I took two of my kids to New Zealand. We traveled with a cheap airline, whose planes seemed to need help with lift-off. As the aircraft built up speed on the runway, the four of us would wildly flap our arms, hoping to give the plane a fighting chance. We looked like ungainly birds, struggling to get our feet off the ground.

With one unpublished memoir [Soul to Soul] flapping away on various runways and now another on the way, I am inclined to think of myself as barefoot and pregnant. Cancer and pregnancy share certain characteristics. They both make you sick and tired, and they grow within you. Cancer is a kind of ghoulish mirror image of pregnancy.

Sequels in this particular literary genre are, understandably, exceptional, and I shall begin by admitting that I can’t know if this sequel is destined to become one of the exceptions, or if the cancer will take me before I say what I need to say.